To Find What Death Lost
by Light of Hemera
Summary: Ichigo has seen the blue haired man most of his life, even though no one else seems to notice him slipping through the crowd, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. He's never spoken with him, but that changes when the man approaches Ichigo to ask for his help in recovering something. Indirectly, of course. GrimmIchi
1. Chapter 1

He was across the road, waiting for someone and flitting his fingers idly back and forth, making eddies in the intervening passage of time that stood before him and the moment when the person he was waiting for would come and drag him away from the tedium of this gray Thursday morning. Understated white coat doing nothing to downplay the stark brightness of his pale blue hair, his eyes roved over and over everything, as if by pinning and marking the placement of the things around him he might affix them in the world, just so; his eyes were as blue as his hair. Left. Right. The woman with her too noisy child. A flickering yellow lamppost light. These things were trapped in his gaze and rested in it for the brief passage of eternity.

Ichigo had lost track of the innumerable number of times he and this man had crossed paths. He cast his eyes around, looking for the inevitable. Would it be the child? Or maybe the cyclist at the end of the road, hurtling towards his unseen and unannounced demise? The truck driver parked to the left of the lamppost was on the phone with his wife, his warm ecru brown eyes abounding with mirth—surely not him.

The screech of brakes pressed too late shredded the morning chatter.

Ichigo sprinted, stretched, screamed out. Too late. Always too late.

He reached the businessman on the ground with the peppered gray hair in time to meet his lined eyes as he breathed once, twice. Stopped.

The air around Ichigo pressed and squeezed and shifted as the blue haired man swept past the fallen ragdoll mimicry of a person, white coat flapping like the clapper of church funeral bells. Ichigo knew without looking to see his back that the blue haired man would have vanished already with his pocket-watch swinging, no more substantial than the whispered pleas of the hushed bystanders.

"Is that—"A trembling cough. "Am I…"

Ichigo opened his hand to the look-alike of the pepper haired businessman who gazed down at his body spread-eagled across the pavement with something akin to resignation, bred of long hours spent in a waking dream of grey.

"Why don't you come with me," Ichigo said. "I'm sure you have a lot of questions."

The two walked hand in hand away from the accident.

The crowd parted.

Quiet settled around them. The sharp smell of burnt rubber followed the Businessman. Ichigo said nothing.

A haze blurred the pair's surroundings, ferrying them through the morning rush as if Life itself drew a cloak around them, muting the acute stimulus and offering some semblance of privacy. Beginnings of questions and tail ends of accusations drifted listlessly from the Businessman's lips, but their weight dragged heavy at the querulous rasping of his breath, and so left it to itself so that they might settle in the dust of the road. The two men continued their course.

The happy little tress of the park swam into sight.

Words now held so much more meaning, this Ichigo knew. When people still had breath to deny what you said, any argument or outlandish claim from without seemed less immediate, less sure.

Nobody was quite so sure anymore once they had died.

As the pair wandered into the shade of the trees, the warmth of the sun burst forth from the sky and illuminated the ground around them, speckling it with what Ichigo had come to recognize as a Call. Singular blades of vibrant green grass jumped out in stark contrast to the gray haze that swaddled the pair up and swallowed them, hiding this most private of moments in the banality of early morning coffee and bleary eyes.

The air that sat next to the beams of visible music vibrated with an intensity that was only met by the inexorable pull from the light on those like the Businessman. A pull to where or to what, Ichigo had yet to find out, but it had been made clear to Ichigo before that the Businessman couldn't answer its voice without first being answered himself.

"Where are you taking me?"

Ah, the million dollar question. "I don't really know."

"You don't know? But you can see me." The Businessman's voice rose ever higher. "I don't, I haven't finished everything I wanted to do yet."

Pleas began to fall, "Please, please, my family, my child, oh my sweet baby," tumbling freely, steep bargains and baseless coercion following them until they all ceased, choked off with a whimper.

Ichigo studied his face. Studied his carefully maintained brogues. Studied the tight way he held his slack hands and noted the careworn skin around his eyes, the tie that hung just right of centre and clung to his neck with all the vivaciousness of a noose.

Ichigo shrugged.

The Businessman nodded to himself, a jerking staccato, as if he had come to some realization or had brokered peace with the craggily-toothed monster that had made its home in his suburban home closet. He took a deep breath. It left him, and then he and Ichigo were all that remained, gazing into each other's eyes, stripped bare to the other by the whipping wind of passing time and the honesty of death with no more diverting words behind which to take shelter.

There was nothing that was hidden to Ichigo about Hiroshi Yamada because in his eyes was the indescribable feeling of his daughter's first giggle, the hushed moments of quiet where he held hands with his wife in the dark—even the pizza boy Hiroshi only saw Saturday nights who wore his cap backwards so that his next regular, the boy with sandy hair and a crooked smile, would give his cap a grin, that pizza boy lived in his eyes too. Ichigo knew all these things that Hiroshi had collected in his mind as if they were Ichigo's very own.

Hiroshi's guilty pleasure of collecting seashells from all the beaches that he had visited was Ichigo's own pleasure for a moment, and the necklace that Hiroshi had made for his wife on their twenty-fifth anniversary felt slightly gritty between his fingers, despite the care that had been taken to clean it. The pendant, a shell from the beach the two had visited on their honeymoon, was gussied up with holes, carefully threaded with gold cord and painted in pastel swatches, carefully wrapped so that the missus might not find it while tidying up their home.

"What's next, Ichigo?"

They gazed at the grass that was lit up with sunlight.

"Because I'm not sure if I'm ready for it to all be over." Hiroshi chuckled as if to cover up something Ichigo had not already seen. "I don't believe in God or anything, but I hope there's…something after this."

"It'd be a quite a trick, wouldn't it, to create something that didn't believe in you just so you could break it and then show yourself afterwards," Hiroshi murmured. He looked to Ichigo, who only gazed back at him with the same level stare with which he had presented to the businessman at the time of their meeting.

"Better be going then," a shuffle of feet and the clearing of a choked throat. "Wouldn't want to keep The Man waiting."

He stepped into the sunlight.

* * *

Author's Note: I only have a vague idea for the plot line of this story, so if you have any smashing ideas about where this could go, please feel free to share them with me. Anything after this chapter is unwritten, so if you're ready for a super long wait time... hi :)

On that note, I hope you enjoyed (...?) and please have a lovely day. Or night.


	2. Chapter 2

"Stay. The. Fuck. Away. From. My. Family."

His heart was in his ears. Red. Inhale. Exhale. Ichigo's fingers scrabbled for a weapon along the slats of his roof. They were sleeping. Defenseless.

He shot to his feet, ready. Not that he could defend them from a fucking Shinigami.

"What, you gonna fight me?" A twitch of the man's lips, as if he was amused.

Ichigo scowled.

"Fuck you." That drew a full smirk, revealing pointed canines.

"Relax kid. I'm not here for your family."

Ichigo almost fell off the roof in relief. They were safe. Maybe. His shoulders rose again, tense.

"Why are you here then?"

The man's brow tightened, a scowl wiping away any trace of humour from his face. His right hand clenched and unclenched, making the veins in his arm jump and twitch.

"I got stuck on babysitting duty," his voice rose in a mocking tone, "'To make absolutely certain that no human soul may come into contact with or otherwise observe Shinigami business.' Fuck if I know why they only got around to it now.

"C'mere. I don't have all day."

Ichigo assessed the distance from the roof to the ground, his eyes flicking back to the Shinigami's face. His gaze was level, but there were traces about the set of his mouth that started Ichigo's heart pounding.

"I'm not fucking playing with you kid—"

Ichigo threw himself off the roof.

He bent his knees. His eyes couldn't close.

The ground was way too close. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck—

Ichigo muffled a grunt as his arm was almost pulled from its socket. Pain shot through the right side of his body as his tendons snapped taut.

Shit. He hadn't hit the ground.

"Great, you're suicidal too?"

The Shinigami held Ichigo casually by his upper arm as they floated. Mid-air. The faint fragrance of silverdrop floated out from Ichigo's bedroom window, clinging to him as his vision wavered between grainy movie and starkly sharp.

"Don't fight it. It's easier if you don't remember this."

Ichigo came to in a room filled with plush white furniture. All of it was arranged in a clinical recreation of a lived-in home—half-open golf magazines, turned to articles about perfecting your swing and the best type of windbreaker for each weather zone, lay on a coffee table as if someone had just risen from their seat. His usual clothes had been replaced by a flowing set of black pants and robes, the robes tied shut with a white sash.

His skin prickled at the thought of someone undressing him.

Ichigo made a quick round of the rooms he could enter; three bedrooms, all with windows, a kitchen, knives in the cutting block with a rather hefty pan in a drawer, and the room he had awoken in, which had the largest window. The windows were locked. So was what he assumed to be the front door. He hadn't found his clothes.

Outside the glass, the midday sun bore down on an expanse of bone-white sand that stretched into the horizon. The rooms were on a high floor, too high to jump from. Just looking out produced a disconcerting wriggle in his stomach. There seemed to be nothing for kilometres. Great.

At least the pants had pockets. Fingering the handle of the paring knife he'd swiped, Ichigo assured himself that its outline was invisible.

A vivacious knock on the door punctured the silence. The front door was open before its echo had disappeared.

"Hello, I hope I didn't frighten you! I'm Nelliel, but you can call me Nel," gushed a busty green-haired woman as she bounded over to where Ichigo was standing, grabbing his hand and shaking it so hard he developed tingling in his fingertips. Gazing at him a moment, she then squealed and whisked Ichigo off his feet, swinging him side to side and dancing across the room with little exclamations of delight. "Oh my goodness, a real, live human! It's so lovely to meet you! I've haven't talked to one in ages!"

She twirled Ichigo around once more ("You actually weigh something!"), before dropping him unceremoniously on his now numb legs. Nel skipped back to the door and continued, "Please come with me. Aizen wants to see you now that you're awake."

She looked at him with eyebrows raised and hazel eyes wide open, expectant. A red mark (paint?) from cheekbone to cheekbone delineated her face strangely, splitting child-like eyes from adult features.

Although Ichigo certainly wasn't wearing her clothes, they appeared to match his in their flowing and monochromatic style. A uniform of some sort, perhaps. On Nel's left hip hung a sword, resting as if in the comfort of the presence of a long-time friend. Its well-worn grip was at odds with the untested enamel of the paring knife's handle.

"Uh, nice to meet you too, Nel."

Her answering grin was face-splitting.

The room that Nel led him to, after anarchic hallways and cochlear stairways, was huge and mostly unlit. From the end they had entered, the other side was hardly visible, and the columns of pillars on either side of the room lent it an inimical air. Judgemental, even. The sort of room one might gather in among the masses to decide on an execution.

Ichigo focused his attention straight ahead, following the orthogonal lines on the floor to distract from the feeling of a bowling ball rolling around in his chest, alternating between crushing his breath and making the action of putting one leg in front of the other almost too hard too to complete.

Nel shot him a reassuring smile when she saw his expression, and he mustered a vague upturn of his lips in return. No use in making a bad impression on a friendly person in an unfriendly place. High up on an unyielding throne at the end of the room lounged the figure of a man, his features shrouded by the light that glared from behind him. Theatrical.

"Hello Ichigo Kurosaki. Apologies for the way in which I've brought you here, but I have a number of questions for you." Although his voice carried throughout the room, there was a certain careful softness in how he allowed the words to rest on his tongue. The portrayal of a man undisturbed. "You caused quite a stir here when we found out you could see Grimmjow." A long pause, as if he could make Ichigo anymore tense than he was now.

"How long have you been able to see him?"

There was ice there, but at least Ichigo knew what cards he had.

"The blue haired guy? Just a couple weeks or so. I dunno," Ichigo shrugged. "The guy's eye-catching for sure, but I got a lot on my mind. Human stuff."

Aizen laughed, but it was more like he was very politely trying to gauge whether Ichigo would be missed if he didn't come home. The room began to fill with the acrid smell of burnt rubber, sharp enough to make Ichigo gag.

"Very astute of you to recognize that we aren't human. I suppose subtlety isn't at all Grimmjow's strong suit." Ichigo's scowl deepened.

"Yeah, my arm knows that, it's probably still got fingerprints." A sharp intake of breath from Nelliel told him he had fucked up. Badly.

"He touched you? With his… hands?" The temperature of the room dropped a several degrees. Aizen leaned forward in his chair, fingers clawing into the stone armrests. It was as if he and the chair had grown larger, more imposing. More ready to pass judgment.

"I guess so. I dunno, I passed out. Figures you'd have to at least touch someone to kidnap them though, right?"

Eyes were appearing along the edges of the room, the bodies they belonged to blending into the shadows of the pillars. The odds against him and Nel getting out of there in one piece were shrinking real small, slimmer than the knife he had in his pocket. The press of unseen figures squeezed his chest and set his heart racing, constricting the room every time a new pair of eyes opened. For the umpteenth time in his life, Ichigo cursed his big stupid mouth.

"I assure you that is not the case."

Restraints appeared around his limbs, glinting in the low light. Nel was holding them in one hand with her sword firmly grasped in the other, but her eyes were the downturned eyes of a solider doing a job. Ichigo was on his own.

"Although it seems clear to me that you have no idea how you can see us, based on your woeful lack of knowledge of our capabilities," Aizen paused to drive the bindings around Ichigo, "I cannot release you until we find out how it is that you are able to do it. Ichigo, I am afraid that you will have to remain here, in Hueco Mundo. Don't worry," Ichigo could feel him painting a smile over his bared teeth, "Grimmjow will be taking very good care of you.

"Oh, and please don't try to escape. You won't make it anywhere."

"Fuck! Not you again."

"The feeling's mutual asshole."

The two were on opposite sides of a room too small for both Grimmjow's ego and Ichigo's anger. Ichigo had been ushered in there by Nel, on the verge of passing out from the apologies that had burst from her lips, and promised a warm meal. That was the only goddamn reason he hadn't tried to bust open a window.

"Why the hell are you still here? You should be wiped and back in your house."

"They said there was a buffet, what can I say?"

"Che, your skinny ass needs more than a buffet. I could snap you in half with my pinky."

Ichigo scowled, his hands already balled into fists.

"Fucking try it and see what happens." A grin stretched itself over Grimmjow's teeth.

It was the grin of a predator.

"That an invitation?" Although he hadn't moved from his corner of the room, space was shrinking around Grimmjow, drawing Ichigo in towards the manic energy that whipped and snarled around the Shinigami, squeezing him closer and closer until all Ichigo could make out was the hazy sheen of Grimmjow's pointed canines. There was no sound in this place, as if a blanket had been thrown over the world to smother any indication of life. There was nothing but Grimmjow's overwhelming, massive presence.

A part of Ichigo was already lashing out in retaliation, but with what he didn't know.

Knife. Right pocket. A little fun won't hurt, he can take it, just let me—

The room rushed back into perspective with a pop and left Grimmjow staring at Ichigo, eyes narrowed. Assessing.

Nel skipped back into the room, hands full with a stew-liquid, which she informed Ichigo was a delightful combination—of every soup that they had.

Strangely, it was rather sweet.

The first thing Ichigo noticed about the rooms they gave him was the smell. It smelled like his own room, fragrant with the perfume of silverdrop. There were no plants in sight. The bed squished and bunched up just like his did, the cleaver had the same star shaped ding near the handle his kitchen knife did, blankets in the lounge had the same texture of those in his room.

The shinigami had examined and studied his mind for what made his house home, and then pasted a sleek mask over their facsimile. He was supposed to sleep in this creepy-ass life size doll house.

Ichigo recalled when his aunt had suggested, in her best impression of royalty, that he and his sisters simply needed a scenery change. Something that had less of a—she had paused, her voice tightening—homely look to it. They could tear out some walls in their dated home that was so last decade, add some more throw cushions and Vucana wool. Chic, modern. A new atmosphere, for all of their sakes. Isshin hadn't asked her back the next Christmas.

It could be worse, maybe. They could have stuck him in a recreation of a French cell from the 18th century and then treated him like a French monarch. One slippery hand and oops, Ichigo Kurosaki was just a name in a book in a vault where no one looked, tended by a sleepy pimply intern with a floppy outdated haircut and eyes that had took up the whole of his face.

Taking the blankets and pillows from not-his-room, Ichigo tucked and tussled the couch and its cushions until he'd made himself a rather good pillow fort, if he did say so himself. It was almost cozy. That was, it was almost cozy if he forgot he was in a building full of supernatural beings that could kill him like wiping the snot from their noses.

He hoped Karin and Yuzu were okay being alone with Isshin.

Author's Note: I've been off of FF for so long that there's no longer a line break function on the Story Format...

On a more encouraging note, I finally found a direction for this story after hopping around the Bleach Wikipedia page! It might be a while before it gets there, but I hope this has been written in a way that makes you want to stick around :) Hoping you are healthy and well, and I'll write to you again soon.


End file.
